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L' Enfant
[ENFAN] Belgium, 2005, 95 min, Color , 35mm Directed By: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne SCR: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne CAM: Alain Marcoen ED: Marie-Hélène Dozo CAST: Fabrizio Rongione, Olivier Gourmet, Jérémie Segard, Mireille Bailly, Jérémie Renier, Déborah François |
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Gripping, concise and flawless, the Dardennes' Palme d'Or-winning L'enfant is clearly the work of masters of narration; each scene begins and ends at the perfect moment; each scene fits into the whole, perfectly. The plot is equally concise: Bruno (Jérémie Renier) is 20, and a thief. His girlfriend Sonia (Déborah François) is 18, and has just given birth to Jimmy, their child. Ill-equipped to handle this new responsibility, Bruno undertakes an horrific act, which itself begets other drastic, life-changing crises. L'enfant is a Dardenne brothers' film par excellence. In their last film, The Son, the Dardennes' handheld camera tracks behind Olivier Gourmet's skull as if trying to penetrate the carpenter's inner world; in the Dostoyevskian L'enfant, the Dardennes stand with Bruno as he waits for a deal to be done, for his child to be picked up, for his life to truly begin. Bruno, Sonia, little Jimmy, Bruno's preteen gang cohort Steve each one is at a different stage in confronting the codes of adulthood. Renier's Bruno is a child thrust into maturity, and he reacts the only way he knows how: by undertaking an action invested with his life lessons learned up to the point when his own child is thrust into his hands, an action that results from living in a world where objects themselves are bereft of any moral value. Call L'enfant the shock of the present, and call it a masterpiece. Selected Filmography: La Promesse (96), Rosetta (99), The Son (02) |
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